Remember a long time ago, how Compaq put the squeeze on its supply chain, dropped the boom on PC prices, and essentially made it impossible for IBM, the former market leader, to stay in the PC business? Well, Dell and other competitors in the PC, server, and storage rackets are trying to do the same thing to HP now, and its financial results for its third quarter ended in July show just how artfully the competition is stealing Big Meg's lunch money.

The New South Wales Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) has cast its eye over the IT sector, and suspects that there's a gap between project management practise and the real world that opens the door to corruption.

UK police and government officials are considering a plan to block the sale of small mobile phones designed to look like car key fobs after confiscating an increasing number of the mini-mobes from prisoners.

Could defending the Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure against amplification attacks be as simple as switching protocols in resolvers? Probably not – but an experiment conducted at APNIC has far-reaching implications.

Just to be clear, we're talking about flash of the hardware variety, not the software behind those annoying animated ads. This is one of those topics that everyone has heard about, most people have opinions on, but where myths and misunderstandings are rife.

Not your mother tongue? We'll turn it into a mangled approximation. PLEASE use us

Google+ just got ever so slightly more user-friendly for those following accounts which tend to post or comment in languages which the user doesn't understand, after adding a one-click translate function.

El Reg asked Samsung how the 3D V-NAND SSD's speed compared with the same company's SM843T 960GB SSD, a high-performance SSD used in data centres and servers released just a few months ago. The reply may surprise some hardened storage veterans.

Taking a break from the promotion of bloodsports, rural campaign group the Countryside Alliance is looking for help mapping mobile phone not-spots in the hope of embarrassing operators into filling them.

Getting tired of EMC's teaser campaign for its coming VNX refresh in September? Relief is at hand: slide decks, blogs and PDFs seen by El Reg's storage desk confirm that EMC's VNX2 is a 7-product line-up optimised for multi-core CPUs and flash with new operating software.

Historians looking back on 2013 might want to call it the Marissa Mayer Effect. Others, more accurately, could attribute Yahoo!'s web traffic leap ahead of Google in the US in July to largely being a hat-tip to, er, Google.

David Miranda, the journalist's partner held for nine hours at Heathrow under anti-terror laws, has managed to get a partial High Court injunction to stop the police "inspecting, copying or sharing" the data they seized from him - except for national security purposes.

Microsoft says it will cooperate with US investigators probing alleged bribery of foreign officials. It's claimed Redmond's resellers bunged cash to apparatchiks in Russia and Pakistan in return for contracts with state-backed businesses.

With the WikiLeaks trial now over, former private first class Bradley Manning has announced the intention to transition sex via female hormone therapy and said she wished to be referred to as Chelsea E. Manning from now on.

The latest product from server virtualization control freak upstart HotLink, called DR Express, was borne out of the company's need to have better disaster recovery for its own internal development cluster. And now, HotLink is ready to take it to the VMware masses.

US encryption vendor CipherCloud, setup by ArcSight founding VP of engineering Pravin Kothari, is going live with an Australian office to provide professional services to local customers and give sales a kick along.

You wanted the Start menu back in Windows 8.1. Microsoft listened ... and didn't give it to you. Now Lenovo says that if a Start Menu is what it will take to get you to start buying Windows 8 PCs, then by gum, a Start Menu you shall have.

In these days of budget cuts and sequesters, it's especially important that NASA gets the most for its money, and so the agency will restart using the decommissioned Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope as part of its quest to map the heavens for asteroids.

Two weeks after it was first made aware of the problem, Xerox has begun rolling out a fix for a software glitch that caused numbers in documents scanned by certain of its WorkCentre multi-function printers (MFPs) to come up garbled.

129% more defendants in recent years, 89% of those in software-patent lawsuits

The US Government Accountability Office (GAO), the independent, nonpartisan "congressional watchdog" charged with reporting to that branch of government how tax dollars are spent, has released its long-awaited report on patent infringement lawsuits, and has concluded that such suits are on the rise.